30 Day Meditation Challenge: Day 10

Tuesday December 15, 2009: Okay, so, in yoga they say “adapt, adjust, and accommodate”, right? Well, somehow the day got away from me and I found myself “adjusting” my meditation schedule to the evening once again. I practiced 2 rounds of the bija mantra, chanting out loud both rounds. I hate to go all Yoda, but I did notice that the force was not as strong as the previous meditation. That said, I experienced some similarities to the previous day’s meditation. Again, energy seemed to radiate from a point between my shoulder blades. So, it felt sort of like wings. I did not experience anything that felt like flying up or leaving my body. But, at the conclusion of the meditation, when I opened my eyes, I did again experience that sense of being an observer of my own body. I wasn’t hovering above it or anything dramatic like that. I just didn’t quite feel like the arms and hands and legs I saw when I opened my eyes were “mine”. It’s a strange state of mind, perhaps because we don’t often consciously examine our relationship to our various moving parts. We don’t typically exclaim, “Why, yes, that’s MY hand moving that cup or typing on this keyboard!” And, yet, we do feel like it’s ours. So, when I open my eyes, I guess what I feel is a momentary sense that while the arms and hands and fingers and toes I am seeing as I look down are real and tangible, they don’t necessarily contain me. It’s a hard feeling to express. But we do sort of experience our bodies as containers, as this tangible, physical thing that is both our way of experiencing the world and a boundary of some sort, a separation between us and other beings or other objects. And for a moment, when I open my eyes, instead of feeling like I’m inside this container, I just see the container.